Although Schmidt's entire book is highly informative about a historical
subject not well covered elsewhere, it is Chapter 2 entitled "Solitude" that
is especially interesting.

Schmidt's thesis throughout his book is that American society evolved a
particular rationale to its nineteenth-century liberal and democratic
ideology by refocusing on religion and the individual. Solitude had an
integral place in the eclectic spiritual thought of the era. Not quite a
syncretism because it retained the strong features of its nineteenth-century
origins, this American spirituality evolved organically from the social and
material conditions of the country, especially New England, and evolved
under the tutelage of a consensus of powerful and often eccentric thinkers.

Chapter 2. Solitude

The author opens Chapter 2 evoking the image of Henry David Thoreau's
famous morning reverie in his cottage at Walden Pond "amidst the pines and
hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness." Thoreau
protested that he was "naturally no hermit" but wrote that

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in
company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be
alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

The significance of Thoreau is not simply his Walden experiment but his
articulation of values learned and exercised there, and his linking them to
universal religious practices: his pond-bathing as ablutions, his food and
material possessions conscious and deliberate expressions of an ascetic
self, his evocation of Hindu and Buddhist discipline, his discovery of
meditation as a method of understanding, and -- above all -- his praise of
solitude.

Thoreau's transcendentalism and his concept of solitude grew within
strong currents of Christianity that inevitably could be evoked as
historical precedent. But, as author Schmidt explains:

Thoreau and company revalued solitude, opening it outward from
specifically Christian forms of retired devotion into more diffuse forms of
aspiration, religious and artistic. ...

Solitude, in effect, underwent a post-Protestant transformation in which
the search for isolation and retreat became the spiritual motto for more
than one generation of seekers. Thoreau and his circle managed to leave a
lasting mark on American imagings of spirituality, evident in a long train
of figures from John Muir and John Burroughs to Thomas Merton and Annie
Dillard who make the solitary life an object of meditation and desire.

The rest of Chapter 2 is therefore essentially an exploration of how the
concept of solitude evolved in nineteenth century American spirituality,
thought, and expression.

A long tradition of Protestant and Enlightenment hostility toward
eremitism was well established in this era, focused specifically on the early
Christian desert hermits. Edward Gibbon, the quintessential Enlightenment
historian, had blasted the "savage enthusiasm" of the desert hermits,
writing that "These unhappy exiles from social life were impelled by the
dark and implacable genius of superstition."

Of course, Gibbon would have applied this sentiment to any Christian, but
he reserved special scorn for the hermits for what he called their "blind
submission to ecclesiastical authority." Representative Protestant thinkers
such as Henry Coventry dismissed hermits as "mystics." Nineteenth-century
successors like Henry Ruffner linked the "saintly savages" to monasticism:
"the monstrous system of Popish tyranny and persecution."

Popular tales that circulated in the first half of the nineteenth
century about more recent hermits reinforced the low and fearful standing of
solitude as destitution. In the lore of contemporary wonders and marvels,
hermits were known far more for lost love and unredeemed suffering than
spiritual potential.

Thus we have narratives of the afflicted black man Robert Voorhis of
Rhode Island, a former slave; of John Conrad Shafford, made solitary by a
life of sorrows; and Sara Bishop of Long Island, who fled the shame of rape into solitude and life in a cave. As Schmidt sums it: "Pity and
Protestant polemic ... were less than promising bases for Thoreau's
revaluing of solitude."

But not all views of eremitism were hostile. An undercurrent of thought
appears in the German Johann Zimmerman, the translation of whose book
"Solitude" was popular in the first half of the nineteenth century in the
U.S. Methodist editor John Eyre advocated solitude for a life of quiet
retirement and spiritual reflection. And mitigating the harsh image of the
desert hermits and cultivating the virtues of solitude became the chief ambition of
Catholic writer Orestes Brownson and in part Quaker authors like the poet John
Greenleaf Whittier.

The true reconciliation of solitude and spirituality remained the
provenance of the Transcendentalists. Transcendentalist thinkers were schooled in traditional theology
(usually at Harvard Divinity School), acquainted with the texts and ideas of
world religions, and eager to address the phenomenon of American
individualism.

What Schmidt calls "the fullest American exposition of the subject in the
nineteenth century" was William Rounseville Alger's "The Solitude of Nature
and of Man" published in 1867. Alger had already published an anthology of
poetry from China, India, and Persia, much praised by Transcendentalists,
and his book on solitude was nothing less in universal scope. Alger studies
the interaction of people and wilderness in the American experience, the
ills of modern social settings, and the value of solitude as "therapeutical
instruction." He has no patience with the value of solitude as egoism or
narcissism but insists on solitude's moral function in the soul. Alger's
cautionary notes lend a measured approach balanced with romantic touches, an
attractive non-sectarian defense of solitude compatible with the popular
consciousness of the day. Concludes Schmidt:

Thoreau's "Walden" and Alger's "Solitudes of Nature and Man" were
telltale markers of the emergence of a spirituality of solitude and fugitive
serenity in American culture.

Chapter 2 then moves quickly through the landscape of American thinking
about hermits and solitude projected into the twentieth century. Various
perspectives tumble forth.

First, a significant transition between Transcendentalism and
appreciations of nature is evidenced in the development of nature writing in
John Burroughs. Secondly, in the social sphere, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's
speech "Solitude of Self" effectively links the status of women, "democratic
individuality, and self-reliance, but also ... the spiritualized solitude of
each human soul." Stanton rejects romantic or sentimentalist notions of
solitude by presenting the suffering of women as an existential reality that
a concept of egalitarianism -- based on the solitude of self -- can address.

Third, eccentric religious expression firmly links to solitude, as represented
by John Chapman, better know as Johnny Appleseed. Usually identified as a
backwoodsman and itinerant, Chapman was in fact motivated to propagate
Swedenborgianism as much as apple trees. His selflessness, simplicity,
solitude, and reverence for animals elicited praise from many quarters. One
contemporary observer described Chapman as a "New England kind of saint,
much like a Hindu saint, akin to Thoreau and Emerson."

Religious excursions into solitude were extended by other representatives
of the new spirituality, such as the prototypical Indian lecturer Chunder
Mozoomdar, popular in New England Transcendentalist circles. The series of
turn-of-the-century lectures by psychologist William James published as
"Varieties of Religious Experience" reflect an apex of American interest in
this eclectic and home-grown spiritual movement. It is not difficult to
project this interest into the twentieth-century, from Paul Bruton to Thomas Merton, as
author Schmidt does.

Conclusion

The place of solitude and spirituality in the trajectory of American
thought "first took flight on the Transcendentalist wing of
nineteenth-century religious liberalism," concludes Schmidt. The role of
solitude in this tradition diverges into various expressions of cultural
creativity, often diverging from the core observations of Thoreau but always
in sight of his important influence. Schmidt's
thesis, that this movement sought to address if not reconcile the unique
American experience of individualism, wilderness, spirituality, and
egalitarianism, is imaginatively developed in his book, an important and informative resource.